The Candle Shall Remain Lit
-- By Shafiq Ahmad
May 22, 2002
“We cannot forget. A people without memory has no future.”
--The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the mothers of the “desaparecidos” (the disappeared ones).
Dear Friends:
A few weeks back, in response to a post by one of the moderators of the Mukto-mona web forum, I wrote an essay titled "Atrocities in One Jenin and the Memory of a Thousand Jenin". Many readers were kind enough to take the time to express their feelings and comments upon reading the piece. I would much like to respond to each one of your messages separately, but I cannot do that due to constraints of time. Instead, I am addressing this message to all those who wrote to me publicly or privately as well as to all other readers.
First of all, I wish to take this opportunity to express my gratitude, on behalf of us the members of the latter generation, to all those older brothers and sisters of ours, whether members of these e-forum or not, who took part in our liberation war actively or indirectly, either within Bangladesh or from overseas. Providence had it that yours would be the generation in the most critical juncture of the history of our nation to liberate it from the marauding army of an alien oppressor. The bizarre course that history took in our unfortunate country from the very inception of our nationhood has resulted in your not being recognised as heroes, though heroes you were undoubtedly. You fought against a well-armed, heartless army and their traitor collaborators not with just your arms, but also with your fortitude and with your love for your motherland. For you and for the countless known and unknown comrades of you who have fallen, we are free with our independent identity today. The name of all of you may not find way into the history books, but there should be little regret in that. What I want to say to you on this has been well-said in that beautiful song in the post-liberation motion picture "Abar Tora Manush Ho":
...hoito ba itihashe
tomader naam lekha robe na,
borho borho manusher bhirhe
gyani aar gunider ashore
tomader naam keu pabena...
tobu ei bijoyi beer mukti shena
tomader ei riin,
konodin shodh hobena...
It is a matter of unending remorse that due to our own ineptness, our own greed, our own lack of foresight and our own inability to carry on with the great struggle that we had started many years ago, the dark, evil and obscurantist forces that were defeated in 1971 have re-emerged from the blind caverns they had crawled into in the afternoon of December 16, 1971. From that time on, they have been, with very considerable success, conspiring to rob us of our precious achievements. They have first instigated fraternal antagonism among us, then they have conspired with the assassins of the great leader whose name was the inspiration of the freedom fighters in the battle fields and whose personage symbolised our nationhood, then they have connived with all our rulers, both patriotic and selfish, to malign or root out virtually all of the basic values which inspired us to wage our long struggle to freedom, and finally they have become part of our ruling elite themselves.
In the process, they have poisoned the mind of the greater part of a whole generation against the inspiring history of our own liberation war. What could be the everlasting fountainhead of inspiration for all of our noble and patriotic efforts have become the source of doubt, divisiveness and even detestation. In 1971, our struggle--through which we became the first nation in the post-colonial world to have earned independence by secession from a much mightier oppressor--inspired freedom-loving people around the world, and yet today, it's story cannot inspire even ourselves. As one friend pointed out in his mail "...I cannot find any semblance of a national agenda in Bangladesh, nor are there great examples of Bangladeshi values which are abundant in example and which would lead us to respect our dead and be anything other than amnesiac and ungrateful...".
There ARE great examples of Bangladeshi values abundant in the history of our liberation movement and our liberation war--superlative examples of patriotism, of love of one's own country, own people and own language, of selfless service to one's society and, above all, of supreme self-sacrifice for the cause of one's motherland. It is just that our hearts are not desirous to look to those shining examples any more. We were the torch-bearer of the hopes and the forward-looking ideals of the oppressed everywhere, and yet, we are beggars today. Today we have to fall back on borrowed values of backward peoples when we ourselves created the prospect of a modern, progressive, enlightened society foundationed on the better attributes of our heritage of a thousand years. We won a long struggle and a sanguinary war, but we could not win the hearts of our own people.
Any soul, however indomitable, cannot but be depressed by this. A century's gestation seems to have brought forth a miscarriage. A million lives seem to have been lost for the naught. The wheel of history seems to have been set backwards.
But I am not willing to give up hope. True, the defeated forces of regression have gotten hold of the harness and are pulling us backward, but retrograde motion for a society is always interim and ephemeral. Over the long run, society inevitably goes forward inexorably.
Therein lies my hope. The obscurantist forces who conspire against the spirit of our liberation movement and our liberation war are on the wrong side of history. They may be powerful and persecuting today, but they are destined for demise into the dark abyss of history.
We are on the side of truth, they are on the side of falsehood. Our vision is directed to the fore, theirs to the rear. Our conviction is grounded on an inspiring history, theirs on ever-changing deception. We seek to move our society forward with the force of self-examining, ever-evolving new knowledge, they want to push our society backward with self-righteous, fallacious dogma. And if history has always advanced forward slowly but surely from oppression to deliverance, from regress to progress, from decay to reinvigoration, then we are certainly on the right side of history.
Many of us are impatient and suspicious of this very distinction between us and them. From my discussions with others and from my reading the comments and analyses of the general public and illustrious people alike, including those of the leaders of our political parties, I come to the depressing realization again and again that many people either entirely miss or dishonestly dodge the whole point of this dichotomy of our national history whereby those who still believe in the spirit of our liberation movement and our liberation war (the much derided “highly chetonized” ones, many of whom, having once risked their lives in fighting the traitors of our liberation war to free our country, have now turned into traitors themselves who are continually conspiring against our beloved motherland) are at odds with those who conspire against it. They associate the two sides of this dichotomy merely with either of the two present-day principal political parties of the nation, both of which have caused enormous sufferings to the common masses of the country in the post-liberation era.
To an uninitiated, it would seem that the choicest bone of contention between these two sides is whether Bangabandhu is being recognized by the state authorities with the appropriate amount of awe or being toppled from the hallowed pedestal which is only commensurate with his godly persona, or whether it is only appropriate to call him names as he was a shameless coward who “surrendered” to the Pakistani army instead of “declaring” independence and thus wilfully court military action by a genocidal army on an unarmed and unprepared civilian population that had no reason to seriously start thinking about an armed fight for secession even three months prior to that disgraceful surrender; or, alternately, whether it is being properly acknowledged that Ziaur Rahman was the greatest liberation war hero, including being the principal figure of the short-lived liberation war by virtue of his “declaring” independence, or whether he was a chameleonic collaborator who was going to unload weapons and ammunitions for the Pakistani Army from the MV Swat even in March 1971, and who joined the guerrilla war only accidentally and reluctantly, so that he was quite not a Muktijoddha in the fullest and the most unsullied sense of the word (though Prime Minister Tajuddin of Awami League was full of praise for him in his first major speech to the Bengali nation during the liberation war and had compared his defence of Chittagong with the heroic defence of Stalingrad during the second world war). An extension of this hackneyed iconography is whether the Muktijoddhas—some 100,000 underfed and sparsely armed irregulars under the command of a handful of very junior Bengali officers and noncoms of the Pakistan Army, many of whom became utterly corrupt in the post-liberation era and most of whom are senile or long dead now—are the embodiment of everlasting glory and patriotism, or they are just the over-worshipped apparitions of a bogus public relation blitz, surviving regrettably from a bygone era.
If these were the only matters at issue, there would have been little point in being either “pro” or “anti” liberation, as the terms are coined. Just because Muktijoddhas fought for the country in the liberation war, they cannot claim to be on a higher moral plane than those who happened not to. Picking some names completely arbitrarily, Hemayetullah Aurongo was a Muktijoddha, and so was Jafar Imam (Bir Bikram). But, considering their post-liberation activities, these people cannot be better choice for public office in independent Bangladesh, than, let’s say, Saifur Rahman or Badruddoza Chowdhury, who apparently were not famous Muktijoddhas. Just because Awami League gave the unchallenged political leadership in the liberation movement and the liberation war embedded in it, it does not automatically make an exclusive or a better choice for political leadership in sovereign Bangladesh. Those who think so, or say so, are muddle-headed bigots.
But here is why this dichotomy between pro and anti liberation matters, and why I become angry when I am counselled portentously that after some thirty years, we should not divide our nation in the name of the liberation war, and that it is time that we cease to look back and should rather look forward to the future only. This reason is plain and simple; everybody knows it. And yet, a lot of us seem not to understand it or accept it intellectually or emotionally. So, for once, I will highlight it again hoping against the hope that it may be driven home this time:
The sovereign nation of Bangladesh was born not out of a conventional independence movement, possibly culminating in a few big battles, like that of India, Pakistan or the USA, but out of one of the worst genocides of modern history. On a relative term, this genocide compared in many respects to the Nazi mass murder of the Jews and other persecuted races in the second world war, the genocide perpetrated by the communist ideologue Vladimir Lenin and then by Joseph Stalin on their own population, the genocide perpetrated by the murderous communist regimes of Mao Tsetung in China and of Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge in Cambodia, or the more recent wholesale massacre of the Yugoslavian Muslims by Slobodan Milosevic and the gruesome mass annihilation of the Tutsi minority population of Rwanda by the Hutus. The genocide perpetrated by the Pakistan Army and their collaborators resulted in the death of at least one million people in just nine months in the most considered estimate to date. It resulted in the exodus of more than 10 million people in less than nine months to West Bengal, Tripura and other border states of India--the largest flow of refugees after the displacement of the European Jewry and other races during the second world war. It resulted in the worst case of mass rape in the twentieth century, surpassing even the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese imperial forces during the nineteen thirties. A special aspect of this genocide was the carefully planned kidnapping and brutal murder of the most accomplished section of the society—perhaps without a parallel in recent history—so that a novel word was introduced to the nomenclature of organized mass murder—“Elitocide”. Anyone who studies the history of the liberation war of Bangladesh carefully will immediately realize how lucky we have been that the criminal Pakistani military junta was reckless enough to start a surprise aerial attack simultaneously on several Indian airfields in Northwest India on the 3rd of December, 1971, thus precipitating an immediate, full-scale attack of the joint Indo-Bangladesh forces on the occupied Bangladesh, causing unconditional surrender of the Pakistan Army in less than two weeks. Otherwise, “Elitocide” would have been much more complete and we as a nation would have been much more decrepit today.
Anyone who wants to know just a little about the unimaginable barbarity of this genocide can read victim and eyewitness accounts in the 8th volume of the “Swadhinata Juddher Itihash Prakalpa,” completed at a time when the so-called “pro” liberation political forces were in seemingly unredeemable political wilderness. Anyone who is cynic and conscienceless enough to disbelieve these accounts can take the trouble of reading the countless reports of foreign journalists in the international press in 1971, or to read the report of the International Jury Commission, arguably the most authoritative and neutral party to report on the events.
This is the MAIN reason why “pro” and “anti” liberation dichotomy matters in independent Bangladesh and will matter for as long as the country exists on the face of the earth and there is even one conscientious person alive. This is why this uncalled for counsel to forget and forgive the past without the carrying out of a just process and to look instead to the future only is criminal at best and sick at worst. We stand knee-deep in the blood of our dead. And we cannot stand those whose hands are bloody with the blood of the innocent martyrs of our liberation war conspire against the very spirit of that liberation war.
I have often heard a curious line of argument in condoning the reprehensible act of making alliance with the criminal collaborators of the Pak Army. This goes something like this: the “collaborator factor” has always been there. But somehow when Awami League makes alliances with the collaborators, it is considered less offensive than when BNP does that….
It is equally offensive and immoral when Awami League makes overt or covert alliance with the al Badars and when BNP does. The martyrs on whose blood we all stand belong to all of us, save the traitors, and it is equally the responsibility of Awami League and BNP and whatever else to condemn, expel and ideally try the killers and the collaborators. And it is a measure of moral bankruptcy when we rejoice at the victory of this group or that when such victory reinstates in national government identified murderers of 1971 and the central commanders of Razakar and al Badar. We need to understand that it is a great defeat for all of us when such traitors become our rulers through the despicable mechanism of fraudulent politics.
There are some people who ask: has not there been political violence in the post-liberation period? Did not Jubo League goondas murder innocent people? Is not Joynal Hazari an Awami thug right in front of our eyes?
How would one respond to such naiveté? These people seem not to have the basic intelligence to see the difference between the state-orchestrated mass murder and mass rape by an occupation army and their traitor collaborators in the independence movement of one’s motherland and the felonious acts of individual criminals and renegades backed by corrupt political parties, crimes which should of course be punished with an iron hand. They are not capable of understanding that the very nature and the sheer degree of the crime committed by perpetrators of a genocide make it the most unforgivable kind of crime, so much so that if the victim or the perpetrator nation does not try the accused, international law allows and obligates any other nation to try him, on the ground that such a crime is an offence against and stigma to the whole humanity (the only other crimes generally subject to such “universal jurisdiction” are terrorism and piracy, for the reason that terrorists and pirates normally are not subject to the jurisdiction of any one country). And the statute of limitation does not expire for this most heinous of crimes.
For over seventy years, the Chinese have campaigned to bring to justice the perpetrators of Japanese atrocities in 1930s and 40s, and only a few months back the Japanese Prime Minister again requested pardon from the Chinese. For years, Chinese women have demonstrated on a particular day every week in front of the Japanese consular office asking for acknowledgement of guilt and reparation. Japanese school students are still made to read about the atrocities committed by their foreparents in school texts, as are German children. It is illegal in Germany to say anything in favor of the Nazis or to disavow the holocaust. Some 57 years after the fall of the Nazi Germany, many ordinary and elderly German women are still being tried in the city of Dusseldorf for their alleged crimes as matrons of concentration camps. The South Africans, even though they earned their emancipation from apartheid under the enlightened and nonviolent leadership of Nelson Mandela, created a truth and reconciliation commission in 1995 to have every important person accused of apartheid-era mass violence perpetrated in 1960 onwards to acknowledge his crimes, many of them being handed harsh penalties. The Rwandans are ignoring the United Nations sponsored war crimes tribunal to hold their own trials and are handing hefty punishments to thousands of accused. Slobodan Milosvic and his cronies could not escape standing trial in the Hague for a genocide that resulted in a much fewer number of people dead than in Bangladesh. The Cambodians are in the process of finalizing their war crimes law to try the perpetrators of a genocide that took place at about the same time that we underwent this ordeal. More than eight decades after the first genocide of the twentieth century, Armenians are campaigning for acknowledgement and reparation from Turkey and organized several Nobel laureates and other illustrious people from around the world to have the international Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal pass a guilty verdict that emphatically states “the Armenian genocide is also an “international crime” for which the Turkish State must assume responsibility, without using the pretext of any discontinuity in the existence of the state to shun that responsibility…”. I could go on and on giving examples, but it is of no use if one would not understand the simplest of things and if one’s conscience has become clouded, as it seems to be the case with half of our populace.
What is so special about the traitors, the collaborators of 1971? Why do we have to reconcile unconditionally with them when we still have the widows and orphans of the butchered intellectuals and the molested Birangana sisters among us crying for justice? Where is our conscience? What is so special about them, other than serving as overt or covert allies or vote-getting partners of both the principal political parties, that we would court reconciliation with them and yet be unjust to the victims of our liberation war? Have they acknowledged their guilt? Have they beseeched forgiveness? Have they expressed any remorse for being the accomplices of the rapists of their own sisters? Have they forsaken their criminal agenda? Have they embraced fully the concept of an independent, secular Bangladesh that was created with the blood and honor of the countless who perished? What is it that can go horrendously wrong if we refuse to reconcile with them and justly keep them in contempt? Are not there other groups in our society that require our greater sympathy? We want unconditional reconciliation with them, and yet why do we not go with a remorseful heart to the countless disabled freedom fighters, the victims of rape, the progeny of the martyrs all around the country who are living in the most abject of conditions but are still willing and ready to make sacrifice for the country?
I have known some of these freedom fighters personally and with a closer eye. In fact, my first ever writing that was printed was a cover story in the 1986 Victory Day issue of the then Weekly Bichitra on the disabled freedom fighters, and it was my experience with the sorrowful stories of the freedom fighters that made me interested in investigating how the other side of the conflict, i.e., the collaborators, was doing (many of the central leaders of Peace Committee, Razakar and al Badar are now fabulously rich, even in North American standards). I have known a wheel-chair confined freedom fighter who showed me x-rays that show splinter from a bomb of 1971 still tucked, at that time over fifteen years from 1971, in the middle of his spinal chord. In 1975, all arrangements had been made for the surgery that would have removed that splinter from his spine, but after the change of the government, he was returned from his hospital bed in an East European country without the procedure being completed. In the Tuberculosis and Chest Diseases Hospital near Mahakhali, I met a septuagenarian freedom fighter who fought in the Meghalaya border region. A bullet from 1971 was still locked in his rib cage. In the same hospital, I met his freedom fighter son who was disabled and dying. In the Disabled Freedom Fighter “Rest House” in Shyamoli, I met a freedom fighter who, during full moon and moonless nights, would chew and swallow half a dozen pain killer tablets in expectation of some relief from his pain. The nation has forgotten these people for whose struggle we are what we are today. They were enormously scornful, of course, for the dire condition that they were left in, but I never heard any one of them express a doubt about taking part in the liberation war. One of the most consistently expressed complaints that I heard from them was that they were called handicapped (“pongu”) Muktijoddha, instead of being called war-wounded (“juddhahoto”) and I made a strong plea in the report that they be referred to as Juddhahoto Muktijoddha. Some of them proudly showed me a letter they received in 1972, signed by Bangabandhu and concluded with our battle cry Joi Bangla, that expressed the deep gratitude the nation felt to them for their sacrifice, requesting them to accept a token monetary gift.
Why do we not feel a greater obligation to these people for whose sacrifice our lives were saved? Where are they now? Why is it that reconciliation is sought only with those traitors fighting whom they were rendered disabled?
Where in the world have traitorous collaborators been “forgiven” en masse without trial and embraced with open arms by the victim population? Where have they usurped power with the connivance of an oblivious, ungrateful populace? Where have they been able to resusciate their abhorable agendum to conspire against the very spirit of the struggle in which their victims lay their lives?
Nowhere. No one can give a parallel to the incredible, shameful saga of the rise of the collaborators in Bangladesh. Rather, most societies have punished and ostracised them. This punishment was not engendered by mere vengefulness; rather, the cause for punishing the collaborators have been to ensure that the memory of the victims are not dishonored and that the traitors cannot conspire against the ideals that were sanctified by the blood of the victims. I recall the debate that took place between celebrated French authors Albert Camus and Francois Mauriac on the question of the trial of the French collaborators. In the interest of “national reconciliation”, Mauriac had urged forgiveness. For his part, Camus, while rejecting hatred as repugnant, felt that “forgiveness was an insult to his dead comrades”, and that the “failure to clean the house would sabotage the chance of building a new social order in post-war France”. Is not that precisely what has happened in Bangladesh?
In my mail, I had compared the carnage in Bangladesh with that in some other nations. What did those other nations do with their collaborators? Did they forgive and forget the collaborators, so that they can eventually come back to power by conspiratorial politics? Does not democracy presuppose proper trial and punishment of criminals who conspire to kill innocent civilians in the national liberation movement of the country? Indeed, the victim nations around the world has been more particular about trying and punishing local collaborators than alien occupiers. The sheer number of collaborators tried and punished in various countries will bear witness to that.
In Holland, somewhere between 250-450,000 out of a population of 9.2 million were investigated and 150,000 were charged with collaboration, of which 96,000 were punished. In Belgium, with a population of around 8 million, over 300,000 were investigated and about 100,000 arrested, with 77,000 found guilty and punished. In Denmark, with a population of some 4 million, approximately 22,000 were arrested, of which 15,000 were brought to trial and 14,000 found guilty. In Norway, with a population similar in size with Denmark, a total of over 90,000 were investigated, with approximately 63,000 found guilty. France brought to trial over 125,000. None of these countries suffered anything even approaching “genocide” in the precise sense of the word, as Bangladesh surely and unquestionably did. Yet, in most of these countries, the number of collaborators found guilty and punished either approached or far exceeded the number of people who were killed.
Were the principal collaborators let go, as in our country? Were they made Prime Ministers and Vice Presidents of their countries within less than a decade of liberation?
No, they were handed harsh penalties. Countries like Denmark, Holland, and Norway passed retroactive legislation re-introducing the death penalty they had revoked many decades ago to deal with extreme cases of collaboration and such war crimes as the torture of prisoners. In Norway, 30 death sentences were passed, of which 25 were carried out. In Denmark, there were 112 death sentences and 46 people were executed. In Holland, 138 death sentences were imposed, 36 of which were carried out. Belgium condemned 4,170 collaborators to death, of which 230 were actually executed. France had given death penalty to 6,763 collaborators (3,910 were handed out in absentia), of which 767 were carried out. These were in addition to the unacceptable, deplorable, extra-judicial summary executions enacted by victorious freedom fighters that claimed many times more collaborator lives than those executed by order of the courts. [I have taken these figures from the 1997 book “The Legacy of the Past: The Problem of Collaborators and the Palestinian Case,” which has the original cites footnoted. The book is published in Jerusalem by the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA)].
There are many people who justly sympathise with the sufferings of the oppressed Palestinian people, but who do not find anything wrong with what the Razakars and the al Badars did to their own countrymen. Do they know how the Palestinians treat their collaborators? It is the stated policy of the PLO that “collaborators must be arrested and put before the Palestinian court”. They have specialized “cells” with names like “Seif al Islam,” “Black Panther,” “Red Eagle,” “Fatah Hawk” etc. whose principal mission involves targeting and punishing collaborators. For many years, Yasser Arafat personally approved capital sentences to suspected Palestini collaborators. In important peace negotiations with Israel—like those leading to the Cairo, the Taba or the Oslo agreements—the Israelis, fearful of the fate of their informers and agents, strongly insisted that the safety of the Palestinian collaborators be guaranteed “until a solution is found to the problem”; each of these agreements contains specific clause ensuring this.
There are other people who contend that the central leaders of Razakar and al Badar are merely “guilty of moral, guilty of conscience and it was their political decision…” to collaborate with the Pak Army. The apparent argument that can be discerned from the garbled statements of such people is that since there is no available hard proof that the Razakar and al Badar central leaders personally kidnapped and killed people, they can not be accused of war crimes (this defies common sense, but let me not get into that).
Nothing can be more uninformed and more dishonest. There is enough circumstantial evidence—diaries bearing lists of intellectuals to be murdered, eye witness statements of close relatives of individuals who were kidnapped, repeated threatening speeches and letters directed to the intended victims right before their kidnapping, testimony of the handful of lower level al Badars captured after liberation and a lot more—that are more than enough to institute legal procedure against these people. But what is overlooked is that few law suits, specially those involving war crimes, start with the hard, legally admissible evidences already collected exhaustively and all concerned witnesses already having given detailed testimony and been cross-examined. It is only when a fair investigative process is initiated that such specific evidences are gathered and all relevant witnesses thoroughly interviewed (what is happening in the Bangabandhu murder case, the jailing killing case?). Now, is it not true that most of the martyred intellectuals in Dhaka city as in other cities, for example, were kidnapped not by Pak soldiers, but rather by groups of young local collaborators whose general description as given by eye witness relatives point palpably to very identifiable groups? Who were these people who came in groups in cars, jeeps and mud-covered buses to kidnap the leading professors, doctors, writers and journalists of the country in the dead of night and in broad day light in December of 1971, when the ordinary people of the city were living with utmost fear and uncertainty in the occupied, curfewed city of Dhaka? Who were threatening the intellectuals in public meetings in the heart of Dhaka city displaying huge banners of the al Badar and the Islami Chhatra Shangha in the second half of November and the first half of December 1971? Why were they doing that? If these were not the thugs who kidnapped the martyred intellectuals of Dhaka city then who did? Who were they? Were they aliens from a different planet who vanished in the thin air after murdering en masse the most illustrious sons and daughters of the soil? Did they disappear underneath the ground after completing their “Shoni (Shoitan Nirmul) Obhijan”? Did the deep waters of the Buriganga part for and then closed again behind these holy assassins like the Nile had parted and closed behind Mosses and his cohort? Is it not our national duty to find out?
But more importantly, these cynic, uninformed people do not know that the laws of war crimes are woven around the central doctrine of “command responsibiity,” whereby a person is culpable of war crime merely by virtue of his being in a position of authority in an organization--regular army, collaborating militia or political organization—guilty of perpetrating war crimes. How many people did Hideki Tojo, Iwane Matsui, Hermann Goering, Martin Bormann or Slobodan Milosevic kill or torture personally? Did they ever personally fired a shot? No, they did not. Yet, they were or would be handed the most serious of punishments, because they were in positions of authority in military, para militia or political organizations that perpetrated war crimes. Razakars and al Badars were officially created para militia organizations on government payroll, the creation of and senior level appointments of which were promulgated by the occupying martial law authority in official gazettes. They had very specific command structures and clearly defined objectives of supporting the military operations of the Pak army. Golam Azam had repeatedly demanded that the Police force be demobilized and their responsibilities be overtaken by the Razakars. The stated purpose of the al Badar was to perform “special operations” (read: kidnapping and murder of the intellectuals and other targeted groups). These are just a few things that make it inescapable that under any war crimes tribunal, the central and high level regional commanders of the Peace Committee, Razakars, al Badars and al Shams would be held as culpable as the regular soldiers of the Pak army.
But we do not have to go that far. The mere speeches that collaborators like Golam Azam and the members of the central leadership of today’s Jamate Islami delivered inciting violence against “miscreants,” “Indian agents,” and “Collaborators of Brahminism” etc. are enough to have them convicted and handed heavy sentences in any impartial war crimes court. The mere document embodying the Central Peace Committee resolution directing Union Peace Committees to “eliminate all Hindus excepting malees, dhopas, napits, methors” and other lower-strata Hindus of the menial occupations is enough to have the surviving members of the Central Peace Committee convicted of war crimes.
There are still other people who raise this nonsense argument that “since thirty years have elapsed since our beloved motherland…..”. Let me not waste any more time on this. Suffice it to say that there is no statute of limitation for war crimes and genocide (let alone war crimes and genocide, is there any for simple murder?) and that there is an abundance of example from around the world where persons accused of war crimes and lesser offences have been hunted down and forced to stand trial decades after they perpetrated the crimes. As I write this, a mostly white jury in an Alabama court today convicted and awarded four life sentences to the 71 year old former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry for his crime of bombing an Alabama church which took the lives of four black girls 38 years ago on September 15, 1963 during the civil rights movement. The verdict brought to a close an often-flawed and often-abandoned investigation into the bombing, which despite gaps of decades in its progress, has finally brought to justice all the men linked to the bombing who did not die before cases could be made. As New York Times reported “…the killers of the girls hid for decades inside a brittle silence that cracked only when they boasted of their involvement in a moment of indiscretion with kin and people they believed held the same hatred. It was largely that boasting, recounted by witnesses, that convicted them all.” This is how, as an example, “reconciliation” happened between the blacks and the whites in the United States—and not by condoning unconditionally the crimes of mass murderers. How many thousand times more heinous are the crimes of the al Badars who conspired to cripple an entire nation for generations, the chief commanders of whom we have made our ministers? Would it be much more difficult to build a case against the murderers of the martyred intellectuals? But we would not do that; we would rather debate and lament the fact that the commanders of the al Badar visited Mecca instead of visiting the Martyred Intellectuals’ Mausoleum on 14th December, and express our hope that they would visit the Mausoleum on the next Martyred Intellectuals’ Day. We are not only ungrateful; we are sick.
In our very Bangladesh, have not we started trying the killers of Bangabandhu and the national leaders more than two decades after their assassination which took place only four years after the killing of the intellectuals? Will these trials be ultimately aborted if they cannot be completed by the courts in the next several years due to high case load or any other reason? Why cannot then the murderers of the martyred intellectuals be brought to justice? Is the trial of the mass murderers of the intellectuals of 1971 any less significant for us as a nation? If one thinks about it, it is nothing but lack of political will that thwarts the trial of the principal collaborators and killers of 1971.
And exactly after how many years does it become “obsolete” and too late? What is the magic number? Why are we such hypocrites? If we can rejoice the arrest, torture and trial of, let’s say, just as a randomly picked example, Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir and the prosecution of a whole array of high level government functionaries for the relatively less blood-letting crime of organizing the Janatar Mancha six years after the incidence, why is it so late to hold trial of the leaders of the Central Peace Committee and the central commanders of the Razakar, al Badar and al Shams who committed a crime that is thousands of times more heinous, a trial that has great implication for all future as long as there will be a Bangladesh and has to do with the conscience of the whole nation and of the entire humanity? Are the al Badar commanders presently running the Jamate Islami with such skill and efficiency any older and senile and anymore unfit to stand trial than these deranged officials on whom we so strongly desire that justice be enacted in full? Where does our reliance on and demand for the impartial course of justice run away when we consider the case of the murderers of our martyrs? To me, this excuse of “too late” is nothing but prejudiced self-deception.
But why do we want the principal collaborators to stand trial after three decades of their treason? Would we not prove ourselves to be hateful and vengeful if we do this? Will it not do more harm to the society than good?
I have written a lot and I have no patience to belabor it anymore. I will just quote from the aforementioned book published by the Palestinian Academic Society:
“…the new post-liberation political authorities [in the countries formerly controlled by the Nazi occupiers] felt they stood in sharp contrast to the totalitarian system imposed on their countries by the Germans during the war. Consequently, in their active pursuance of the collaborators they were not just responding to public anger and the desire to punish those who, to some degree or other, had betrayed their fellow citizens. They also felt they were lying the foundations for a new democratic post-war order. The purging of the collaborators was a purification process. Part of it was about revenge and retribution, but primarily it was about cleansing the society. The whole process was seen as integral to the construction of a new order that was the complete antithesis of the fascist totalitarianism of National Socialism.
To adopt a medical analogy, it was as if the immediate post-war regimes saw themselves as doctors, charged with healing a body that had been wracked by a disease. The treatment required a certain amount of surgery, and a degree of attention to the distressing symptoms of the disease, but this was seen as preparatory to the establishment of a new therapeutic regime, which would build up the body’s defences against any recurrence of the malady, thereby ensuring the growth of a regenerated and healthy social organism.
This is the kind of challenge that many people hope the Palestinian political authorities will be prepared to take up in the context of a final settlement.”
We never went through that purification process. We never underwent that surgery. After it struck us with its deadliest bite, we let the black serpent crawl away with the venom fang unbroken, so that it could later hiss out again of its dark cave with all the venom in its body undiminished. Hence, our body and our heart are afflicted with ever-spreading cancer today. Hence, the serpent today can poison the minds of our impressionable youth against the uplifting history of their own nation that their forebears shed so much blood, sweat and tear to inscribe. Our foreparents wrote an inspiring history with their blood that would be the envy of any other nation, synthesizing in the process the essence of our millennia-old heritage and at the same time giving enlightened direction for the far-spreading future, and yet we have no use of that today. Instead, we continually diminish and even deride the sacred memory of those martyrs, while we take, at the best, a cautious “neutral” approach to these genocidal betrayers.
But when it is between burning truth and dark falsehood, between mass-murdering traitors and self-sacrificing martyrs, between the blood-sanctified spirit of a nation’s struggle for freedom and the evil conspiracy of the defeated betrayers against that spirit, neutrality is synonymous with sham fraud that befits only the spineless coward.
The faithless traitors may have the upper hand today, and we may have our deplorable self-doubt and self-pity and our abominable “neutrality” eat up today our vitality and our sense of right and wrong, but the spirit of our liberation struggle is indestructible. Those who deride and disparage the spirit of our liberation struggle will pass away into the waste-yard of history in no long time, but that spirit will survive for as long as the Bengali nation exists on the face of the earth. Today it may be only a spark in the hearts of a few who refuse to reconcile with those who continue to dishonor the sacred memory of our dead, but one day it will fire a conflagration that will burn the mutable lies that hold our nation back. It will; history is witness. With their blood, the countless martyrs of our liberation struggle lighted a candle the flame of which is eternal. It will remain lit, shining upon the hearts of the true patriots of our nation who are yet to come, from generation to generation into the timeless future. It is not in the power of anyone to extinguish that candle; it will remain lit forever.
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Published at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/6082